australian films – ALLIANCE OF WOMEN FILM JOURNALISTS

BIRTHRIGHT (Tribeca 2025) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

June 10, 2025June 9, 2025 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas australian films, Birthright, Tribeca 2025, Zoe Pepper

While ostensibly a comedy, Australian writer-director Zoe Pepper’s debut feature Birthright is as pitch black as it comes. The film follows Cory and his heavily pregnant wife Jasmine, a millennial couple whose life has been upended by an unstable rental and employment market. With a baby due any day, out of pure desperation Cory swallows his pride and returns home unannounced to his wealthy but mean-spirited boomer parents, Richard and Lyn. Passive-aggression turns to aggressive-aggression in mere days, as Cory and Jasmine are mortified by his parents’ greed and cruelty.

Festivals Reviews

INSIDE (Tribeca 2025) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

June 4, 2025June 6, 2025 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas australian films, Charles Williams, Cosmo Jarvis, Guy Pearce, inside, prison movies, Tribeca 2025, Vincent Miller

While Inside offers a suffocatingly powerful instance of the Australian prison drama, it is also about something far greater than the country’s oft-demonstrated fascination with its own penal past. It is a film about absent and dysfunctional fathers, both literal and symbolic, a kind of roadmap of the complex and insidious forms intergenerational trauma can take on young men doomed to become older ones. These men will do anything to deny responsibility for their actions, blaming others – even the penal system itself – rather than owning up to their own flaws. But the film identifies the possibility for hope. It’s thin, but it’s there, and it is this which ultimately propels Inside into something almost mythic.

Reviews

PURE SCUM – Review by Silvi Van-Wall

May 16, 2025January 13, 2026 Silvi Van-Wall australian films, Fantastic Film Festival, Nikita Chronis, Pure Scum, Will Hutchins

Lightning-paced, violent to the extreme, and bursting with melodrama, Pure Scum is the antithesis to a comfort watch – indeed, it is a film so viscerally unpleasant that I had difficult pinpointing whatever magic sauce it had in it that made me want to keep watching. Two trouble-seeking private schoolboys, Ayden – a ‘gifted child’ turned drug dealer – and Jesse – a manipulative, charismatic rebel – decide to go out on the town after their high school graduation. Mere minutes later, a devastating car crash leaves them foolishly fleeing to the Melbourne CBD to escape the consequences. Bad decision after bad decision turns a bad night into the worst night imaginable, and transforms this film from a mere ‘actions have consequences’ PSA to a series of near-divine punishments one might call ‘the eshay’s eternal damnation’.

Reviews

THE SURFER – Review by Lynn Venhaus

May 5, 2025May 8, 2025 Lynn Venhaus australian films, Finn Little, Julian McMahon, nicholas cage, Radek Ladczuk, The Surfer

Director Lorcan Finnegan attempts to keep us as rattled as the lead character, who is never named, as he spins out of control. Because we are thrown off-balance, not knowing if this is reality or a nightmare, the only certainty is Nicholas Cage is in full over-the-top mode. Finnegan should have explored more of the ‘us vs. them’ storyline the film started with, and why it mattered. It needed more substance than Cage going full Cage, although that is a fan draw, especially if this winds up on the midnight movie circuit.

Festivals Reviews

ONE MORE SHOT (SXSW 2025) – Review by Valerie Kalfrin

March 15, 2025March 15, 2025 Valerie Kalfrin Aisha Dee, alice foulcher, Ashley Zuckerman, australian films, Emily Browning, Nicholas Clifford, One More Shot, Sean Keenan, SXSW 2025

It’s 1999, and even with the new millennium buzz, thirtysomething Minnie (Emily Browning, Class of ‘07) doesn’t have her act together. After a rough day at work—and some nagging from roommates to find her own place—Minnie is bummed when she learns that her old flame Joe (Sean Keenan, No Escape) is back from abroad to ring in the New Year at a friend’s place. So Minnie throws on a sexy red dress, digs out the tequila someone gifted her from Mexico years ago, and perks up for a life-changing night. But once she takes a shot on the doorstep for fortitude, she sets up a time loop that resets with every swig.

Interviews

Adam Elliot on MEMOIR OF A SNAIL and Stop Motion Animation – Pam Grady interviews

November 4, 2024November 10, 2024 Pam Grady Adam Elliot, australian films, ifc, Jacki Weaver, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Memoir of a Snail, Mill Valley Film Festival, Sarah Snook, stop motion

Adam Elliot, whose latest animation, Memoir of a Snail, is currently in theaters, can’t imagine spending his days attached to a computer. That distaste for a life spent perpetually engaged with technology altered the course of his life when he became interested in animation while in film school in his native Australia. Instead of pursuing computer graphics like so many of his classmates, he forged his own path with stop-motion animation, joining a select group that embraces the retro form that includes Tim Burton, Henry Sellick, Guillermo Del Toro, and the folks at England’s Aardman Animation and Oregon’s LAIKA Studios.

Festivals Reviews

HE AIN’T HEAVY (Melbourne IFF 2024) – Review by Nadine Whitney

August 26, 2024August 27, 2024 Nadine Whitney australian films, David Vincent Smith, Greta Scacchi, He Ain’t Heavy, Leila George, Melbourne IFF 2024, Perth, Sam Corlett

David Vincent Smith’s debut film He Ain’t Heavy is an astonishing piece of art. A story of one family dealing with the fallout of mental illness and addiction; and the limits of being able to care for the person inside the disease. Max becomes a violent almost demonic presence in his sister Jade’s life. Trying to protect herself and her mother Bev from Max’s outbursts has made her put her life on hold. In an act of desperation, she kidnaps Max to get him through detox – as all the programs he went into previously have failed. The rawness and honesty of David Vincent Smith’s film is disarming. A blazing debut from an Australian talent tackling difficult subject matter with nuance and grace.

Festivals Reviews

THE ORGANIST (Melbourne IFF 2024) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

August 26, 2024August 27, 2024 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas Andy Burkitt, australian films, Melbourne IFF 2024, The Organist

This microbudget indie budget debut of filmmaker Andy Burkitt follows Graeme, a hardworking young man in the organ-procurement trade who is shocked to discover that the job he believed to be an ethical attempt to provide organs for life-saving transplants is in fact merely a cover: he works, in fact, for a very rich cannibal. Mortified by this revelation, Graeme’s negative response hilariously finds him in trouble with his company’s HR department, putting him on a path to righting what to his eye is an unquestionably unethical wrong.

Festivals Reviews

IN VITRO (Melbourne IFF 2024) – Review by Nadine Whitney

August 20, 2024August 19, 2024 Nadine Whitney Ashley Zukerman, australian films, Melbourne IFF 2024, scifi, Shelly Farthing-Dawe, Talia Zucker, Tom McKeith, Will Howarth

Will Howarth and Tom McKeith’s more cerebral and low-fi In Vitro does away with massive cataclysmic events and focuses on slow resource attrition. Things are simply falling apart in depressing entropy. Much like the marriage of synthetic meat farmers Jack (Ashley Zukerman) and Layla (Talia Zucker). The future looks uncannily like now except with large tanks for fully cloned animals. In Vitro is disturbing and magnificently utilises the odd phantasmagoria of the Australian rural landscape to make an impact.

Reviews

THE BABADOOK – Review by Diane Carson

August 8, 2024August 11, 2024 Diane Carson australian films, Essie Davis, horror, jennifer kent, rerelease, the babadook

The best horror films translate nerve-jangling fears into frightening scenarios, tapping into conscious as well as suppressed anxieties: the malevolent stranger, the elusive intruder, or the evil doppelganger. The deliriously unnerving Australian film The Babadook capitalizes on those terrors, probing the dark, repressed unconscious of widow Amelia who struggles to care for and about her increasingly difficult son Samuel.

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